H-word, M-word & fading K-word: Stop seeing India through old prisms

If the only superpower, which calls India an ally, sees the region through an India-Pakistan prism, it is unacceptable. Rather than endorse India's sphere of influence, this undermines it

Much as I would’ve wanted to use “khota sikka”, the challenge of finding an exact translation brings me to the usual bad penny. Let’s say, therefore, that like a bad penny, the dreaded H-word is back with us -- H, as in hyphenation with Pakistan.

 

And its return is dreaded because our successive governments have laboured for three decades to rid us of what we see as the equivalence the big powers (read the United States) used to draw between us and Pakistan. Three things follow.

 

Let’s call the first the “zero-sum game”. If Washington sees the subcontinent in a